When we got to the next town, the first thing we did was head straight for the nearest restaurant. My heart swelled with happiness we stepped in the door. Not only did it smell of hearty stew, but it looked just like the kind of place I had always daydreamed about: swinging sign over the door, smoke-stained roof beams, gruff patrons. Actually, I realized as my eyes adjusted to the lower light inside, most of the customers looked disappointingly similar to the folks back home. They looked like farmers, the most boring kind of people in the world. There was one man at a table in the corner, however, who caught my eye. His hair was blue and his eyes were dangerous. He wore leather and carried a sword. He glared straight at me over his mug.

Exciting! I had finally met the man of my dreams! Eruk was sweet and all, but this blue-haired stranger was much more like the kind of guy I had expected to meet in my adventures. He was so cool looking!

I would have gone straight to the swordsman's table, but Eruk dragged me out of the restaurant.

"Hey! What'd you do that for?" I shouted, struggling in his grip.

"We can do better than that."

I looked up at him in surprise. His nose and eyebrows were wrinkled with disgust although I couldn't imagine why.

"I saw a market a few blocks from here. Let's get some fresh vegetables and meat and I'll make dinner."

I was doubtful, to say the least. As my mother always said, "A man belongs in a kitchen like a dog belongs in a china cupboard." Why should I subject myself to Eruk's attempts at cooking when there was a perfectly good restaurant available? My curiosity won out over my hunger. Let the boy cook if he wants to; we can always go back to the restaurant later.

"Sure, go ahead," I said. "I've never seen a man try to cook before. It should be amusing."

"I don't hear you volunteering to cook."

I am, shall we say, somewhat lacking in culinary talent. My mother has been trying to teach me since I was practically a baby but my cooking still comes out uninspired and somewhat burned, or else very inspired and practically inedible. ("Chili powder? What chili powder?" "I thought the fire spell would make it cook faster." "What do you mean there's no such thing as lamb chaos?") However, he didn't need to know that.

"Why should I go to the trouble of cooking when I can go to a restaurant? Or get you to do it for me?"

He just shook his head and walked toward the nearest vegetable cart.

"How much further are you planning to drag me? And why can't you carry your own bags?" I whined.

"I've got two bags. You've only got one," Eruk pointed out.

I switched the bag to my other hand and opened my mouth to start complaining again. Before I could, Eruk nodded toward a grove a trees just up the road. "That looks like a good place."

I lagged along behind him, trying to shake life back into my overburdened arms.

Eruk gratefully dropped his bags beside a stump and I followed suit.

"Get me some water," the golden haired autocrat ordered me, holding out our newly-acquired pot. "I'm going to chop vegetables."

"Fine, fine," I agreed, taking the pot.

It didn't take me too long to find water. There was a stream across the field from where we were camped. Its path was marked by bushes that had taken advantage of the water source to grow taller than the surrounding, half-grown barley. I filled the pot and started lugging it back toward Eruk's grove. I had never realized before just how heavy water is! I had to stop and rest after only twenty steps. Stupid Eruk, making me do all the heavy lifting and carrying.

Wait! Maybe I was the stupid one.

"I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner," I muttered, "Levitation!"

After that, carrying the water was much easier.

"Thanks, Lana," Eruk said when I dropped the pot beside him. His smile almost made all the effort worthwhile. Almost.

"After making me carry all these heavy things, dinner had better be good," I warned him.

He grimaced half-reassuringly, half-worriedly. "I hope so. Would you like to help me cut things up?"

"You're the one who volunteered to make dinner. Do it yourself. I'm going to wash the charcoal out of my clothes."

"What clothes?" he snickered, "All I see is charred leather vest and a few ragged strips of fabric."

"Very funny, Eruk," I said sarcastically.

"If those trousers legs had burned any higher, your hips would be showing!"

I sent a relatively small, cool fireball at his head. "There. Let's see how you like it!"

He was still screaming and waving his arms in the air when I left the grove. Wimp.

I was lured back an hour or so later by absolutely delicious smells.

"Mmmm," I sighed in delight. "Hey, Eruk, is the soup ready yet?"

"Not yet. It needs about another half-hour. Besides, I'm not sure I should give you any food after you threw a fireball at my head."

"But I carried groceries and got you water! And it wasn't a very big fireball. It didn't even scorch one curl on your head." I couldn't bear to damage those beautiful curls or I would have made it a lot hotter.

"That's no excuse. I thought you were supposed to be protecting me, not beating me up!"

"Well, you deserved it. You were leering at me."

"I was not!"

"Were too!"

"Was not!"

"Were too!"

"Okay, maybe I was." He had the grace to look a little guilty. "But you can't expect a man not to leer a little bit at a half-naked girl, even one without any breasts."

"I have breasts!" I retorted. They might be only half-grown, but they were there. "I'm a woman and all women have them. Even some men do if they're fat enough."

Wonderboy seemed to consider that. "I don't," he announced. "I'm as flat as a washboard from here to here." He pointed first to his collar and then to his belt.

The statement was so ridiculous that I forgot to be mad at him. "No one has a chest that flat. Even children are a little bumpy," I stated flatly.

Before I even realized what he was doing, he had taken his shirt off!

"Eruk!" I protested.

"See?" he said smugly.

Of course his torso wasn't really as flat as a board. His bones showed faintly through the skin (although not as much as mine did), and he didn't have any square corners or anything. However, it was the flattest body I had ever seen. No muscle. No excess fat. Not even any chest hair.

I pointed these facts out. He shrugged uncomfortably, finally starting to show signs of embarrassment. "What do you expect? I'm a priest not a swordsman. And I'll probably grow some chest hair eventually. After all, I'm only sixteen."

"That young?" I asked in surprise.

The boy actually puffed up with pride. "You thought I was older?"

So he was just as under-aged for an adventurer as I was. Oh well. With our early start, we would be hardened professionals by the time most people our age got around to leaving their home villages.

"Put your shirt back on, Eruk," I said wearily. "No one wants to see your washboard chest."

In the moment when his shirt completely covered his head and his arms were tangled in the sleeves, a grey blur streaked over our stew pot and landed on top of him. I screamed. He shouted in surprise. It was a huge wolf.

Wasting no time, I grabbed my staff and started prodding the wolf gently in the chest to try to get it off the man I was supposed to be protecting. Eruk writhed, trying to tilt it off. The wolf growled.

"Lana, what is it?" Eruk shouted.

"Hold still. It's a wolf," I shouted back. He froze.

I pushed harder with my staff. The wolf growled warningly again.

I thought fast. "Eruk, when I tell you to, cast a powerful shield spell."

He gave a muffled grunt of assent.

"Diem Wing!" The wind spell sent the wolf flying off Eruk's back. "Now!" I shouted.

The wolf crashed head first into a tree. Unfortunately, it was only a small tree, this being a rather small grove, so the tree suffered more damage than the wolf did. Before the wolf even hit the ground, I found myself surrounded by the faintly bluish bubble of a shield spell.

At my feet, Eruk finished pulling his shirt on. "Wow, that's a big wolf," he observed shakily.

I agreed. I hadn't seen very many wolves before so I wasn't sure what size was typical, but this one was as big as me and Eruk put together! I was pretty sure they weren't supposed to be that big.

The wolf stumbled back onto its feet, shook its head until its eyes uncrossed, and growled angrily. It launched itself at us but bounced off the shield. Undeterred, it threw its body against the shield again and again, trying to batter it down.

Eruk stared at the wolf, wide eyed. "My mother always said that wolves were peaceful creatures who would only attack humans if they were starving or to protect their cubs or something else like that," he commented uncertainly.

"Either she was wrong, or this is not a normal wolf," I replied grimly.

We watched the wolf beat itself against the shield.

"Do you think it will give up if we wait long enough?" Eruk asked at length.

I pulled myself together. "Maybe, but I'm not going to wait that long. For one thing, having that thing crashing around all evening would make me loose my appetite, and that would be a waste of a delicious-smelling dinner. Let's deal with it now."

He swallowed. "Okay. What do you want me to do?"

"On second thought, I'll deal with it. You just protect yourself and our dinner."

"Are you sure?" He didn't sound happy about letting me face the creature alone but at least he knew better than to butt in on a fight where he would only get in the way.

"Oh yeah," I assured him with more confidence than I really felt. "To a girl who fought a black dragon and won, a wolf is nothing. Let me out of this bubble."

"Okay, but be careful. It might be rabid or a werewolf or something." He looked at me for a long moment with worry in his tender, green eyes before recasting the shield spell with a much smaller radius.

A breeze ruffled my suddenly unprotected hair. The wolf, in the process of throwing itself against the shield again, tripped over its own paws when the shield suddenly wasn't where it expected. I took advantage of its momentary helplessness to launch myself onto its back. I wrapped my arms around its furry neck and my legs around its body. "Digger Volt," I whispered into its pointy ear. It writhed in my arms as lightning ripped through its body. Behind me, I heard Eruk groan in sympathy. Whose side was he on anyway? I kept up the spell until the wolf in my arms started to smell strongly of singed fur.

I cautiously unwrapped myself from the body. The twitches died out. The wolf lay completely still. I prodded it with my boot but it appeared to be genuinely dead.

Eruk came to look over my shoulder. "That was the scariest thing I've ever seen," he said.

"Yeah, that wolf was crazy!" I agreed feelingly.

"So are you! Do you realize that there were sparks shooting out of your hair? And what possessed you to body-tackle a rabid wolf anyway?"

I scowled. Of all the ungrateful people... "It worked didn't it? Now, help me get this thing out of our way," I commanded him, grabbing the front end of the giant wolf. He obediently grabbed the back end and between us we managed to lug it out to the side of the road.

"That wolf has nice fur," I commented, as we headed back into the grove. "Do you think I would look good in a fur vest?"

He gave me a weird look. "You are a very, very strange little girl, aren't you?"

"I am not!" I protested angrily. "Would you have preferred for me to let the wolf eat us?"

"It's not that..."

Our argument was interrupted by the sight of a stranger seated at our campfire. No, not a complete stranger. It was the blue-haired man I had seen in the restaurant.